| Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy |  | Author: Moises Naim
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
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Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 34,656
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
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Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1400078849
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.135
EAN: 9781400078844
ASIN: 1400078849
Publication Date: October 10, 2006
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Amazon.com Review
Illicit activities are exploding worldwide. The onslaught of globalization has unleashed a tidal wave of bad stuff--everything from arms trafficking, human smuggling, and money laundering to music bootlegging. Here is the dark side of globalization: the mushrooming underground economy. Moisés Naím explores this murky world in his book Illicit. Naím is the editor of the relaunched magazine Foreign Policy and a former executive director of the World Bank and Minister of Trade and Industry of Venezuela. In Illicit, he unties the connections between the Colombian cocaine dealer, the New York banker steering money to offshore tax havens, the Albanian forcing women into prostitution, and the Chinese market stall-holder selling counterfeit DVDs. Naím reports that legitimate global trade has doubled since 1990 from $5 to $10 trillion. Meanwhile, money laundering has gone up tenfold, exceeding $1 trillion a year. Smuggling and money laundering have always existed, but Naím shows how they have increased at a staggering pace in the wake of globalization, despite new government controls since 9/11. The main culprits are the collapse of the Iron Curtain and state deregulation. As the reach of organized crime has expanded, governments have failed to keep up. Naím illustrates the problems with stories about A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb who sold nuclear technology to North Korea and Libya; Walter C. Anderson, an American who was accused of hiding $450 million in offshore accounts to evade taxes; and Vladimir Montesinos, the Peruvian intelligence czar who is on trial for trafficking drugs and arms. The book, while a little dry, will be interesting to policy buffs and aspiring crooks alike. --Alex Roslin
Product Description
A groundbreaking investigation of how illicit commerce is changing the world by transforming economies, reshaping politics, and capturing governments.
In this fascinating and comprehensive examination of the underside of globalization, Moises NaÃm illuminates the struggle between traffickers and the hamstrung bureaucracies trying to control them. From illegal migrants to drugs to weapons to laundered money to counterfeit goods, the black market produces enormous profits that are reinvested to create new businesses, enable terrorists, and even to take over governments. NaÃm reveals the inner workings of these amazingly efficient international organizations and shows why it is so hard â and so necessary to contain them. Riveting and deeply informed, Illicit will change how you see the world around you.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
 The Bureaucracy vs. The Network December 3, 2005
KEVIN M. OCONNOR (Centerton, AR United States)
37 out of 38 found this review helpful
Illicit bursts with detail and example, though it contains very little in the way of illustrative anecdotes. The author seems mainly concerned with communicating two main points. First, our conceptions about the nature and organizational structure of international trafficking networks has fallen dangerously out of date. Second, operating assumptions and ideological sacred cows prevent governments from framing the problem of illicit trafficking in a way that will allow for constructive action.
Concerning the first point, the "cartel and kingpin" conception of narco-trafficking formed and propagated in the 80's no longer applies. Our present counter-narcotics strategies assume that the enemy organization has a hierarchical structure with information and power flowing up and down a chain of command. In fact, trafficking organizations these days take the form of decentralized networks which shift continuously, assuming new configurations as opportunities present themselves and then morphing again to meet the needs of the next moment. Also, today's traffickers don`t specialize in a single commodity like cocaine. Instead, they move whatever goods present an opportunity for profit in the present moment; drugs today, arms tomorrow, people the next day and then knock-off designer handbags after that. Only the small players at the beginning and end of the supply chain specialize in particular products, e.g. the Bolivian coca farmer and the illegal immigrant selling bootlegged DVDs or knock-off Rolexes on the streets of New York.
The author's second point concerns two ideological sacred cows. First, he warns against the politically entrenched practice of talking about illicit traffic in strictly moral terms. Government officials denounce illicit traffickers as evil-doers rather than acknowledging that traffickers act from economic motives determined by market forces. Drugs and other illicit goods bring great financial reward when moved from one place where traffickers can purchase them at a low price to some other place where they command a high price. Adaptive systems like markets and networks make short work of the kinds of problems that prohibition-minded bureaucratic hierarchies place in their way. Talking about illicit trafficking in economic rather than moral terms would produce a more intelligent discussion and offer more effective courses of action.
Here and there throughout the early chapters, the author drops the occasional hint that he advocates legalizing marijuana, and at the book's end he makes that point explicit. In a free society marked by an ever-increasing volume of international trade, governments will have to pick their battles. Spending billions to try to interrupt the traffic in marijuana makes no sense if we hope to make any headway curtailing the trade in nuclear weapons technology, radiological materials and sex slaves. Don't mistake Naim for any kind of Libertarian. He makes it quite clear that he wants to see governments win the battle against illicit traffickers. He just knows that, realistically speaking, we have to prioritize, and that trying to keep millions of eager marijuana customers from millions of eager sellers serves no useful purpose and consumes resources that could otherwise be put to good use.
The other ideological sacred cow involves national sovereignty. Naim doesn't advocate subordinating the US federal government to the U.N., but he does call for much greater coordination of efforts with our closest allies, and such a move will entail some compromise of the absolute national sovereignty upon which the US government now insists.
Definitive Volume--$2T/Year and Growing, Lost Government Revenues October 30, 2005
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
49 out of 61 found this review helpful
I have known Moises Naim for many years, and admired his pragmatic approach to managing the content of Foreign Policy, as published under the auspices of the Canegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been Minister of Trade and Industry in Venezuela, a dean and professor of business administration, executive director of the World Bank, and an accomplished thinker and author. Above all he has been moral. He gets it: morality in politics and morality in business are priceless.
This book is important in two very big ways: the first, the one that most are noticing, is that it documents very ably the fact that crime pays--the author has done a superb job of itemizing the global illegal trade industry in a manner that could be understood by anyone, and the bottom line is frightening in that illicit trade is perhaps $2 trillion a year, while legal trade is between $5 trillion and $10 trillion. Off-the-books bartering and immoral invoicing within corporations are additional reducers of government tax revenue--import export tax fraud in the USA is known to be $50 billion a year ($25 rocket engines going out, $10 pencils coming in).
The second reason this book is important, the real value of this book, is in documenting the revenues lost to government. Legalizing prostitition has economic as well as public health implications. Reducing the arms trade, where the US is the greatest exporter of violence and bribery, has implications across ethnic conflict, stability, water and oil conservations, and so on. Eliminating counterfeiting and illegal immigration would have enormous implications for positive constructive government revenue. I personally know where $500 billion a year can be found in additional tax revenue for the US, mostly from eliminating pork barrel subsidies and corporate fraud, and by restoring the traditional share of corporations to the tax fund--when Halliburn pays $15M on billions in profit, when Exxon makes $3 billion in profit in a single quarter with no requisite tax bite, the system is broken. Eliminating crime, and corporate crime, provides the financial foundation for restoring the democratic contract, the social contract, with the working class and the middle class.
Moises Naim has, in brief, delivered the seminal work on one of the five factors that will determine how the human species does in its World War with itself and with bacteria. The other four factors are the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, the virulent re-emergence of infectuous diseases accompanied by the mutation and migration of new diseases from animal hosts to humans; and the promising but by no means assured emergence of collective democratic intelligence, perhaps aided by real-life decision support games such as those produced by BreakAwayLtd.com.
I consider Dr. Naim to be one of the most precious intellects now active--as penetrating but more pragmatic than Joe Nye, as strategic but more pragmatic as Zbigniew Brzezinski, as articulate but more pragmatic than my all time favorite strategist, Dr. Colin Gray from the United Kingdom.
Naim is a giant. He also represents, if I may be permitted an observation from my decades in Latin America and my Colombian-born mother, why Latin America is the future and why the US ignores the Chinese takeover of Latin American lands and resources, the Iranian penetrations, and the related Brazilian, Indian, Pakistani, and Russian incursions, at its peril. Latin America is both the source, and the solution, for most of the illicit trade that undermines the Republic. It's time we recognize that morality matters, crime is a greater threat than isolated terrorism, and Latin America is part of the Americas--the part that may achieve informed populist democracy before the USA recovers from the neo-conservative coup d'etat and ethical misadventures of a White House owned by Halliburton and dismissive of both the domestic and international publics.
Captivating! October 30, 2005
Eusebio Mayz
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is one of the the best books I have read this year. I could not stop reading it once I started. It combines jaw-dropping facts that we should all know-- but don't --with fascinating stories about how the globalization of smuggling is changing politics everywhere. As the Editor of The Economist writes in the back cover this book changes the way one sees the world. Naim is a great writer. Read this book.
Attacking Illicit Trade January 7, 2006
Rens Lee (Washington, DC)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Illicit is a thought-provoking, though somewhat derivative, study of modern-day transnational crime and the challenges it poses to governments. The significance of interconnections between globalization, illicit trade, and world politics has long been apparent to specialists, if not to inveterate cold warriors and rarefied academic traditionalists. The writer skimps a little on important topics; for example, there is much more to the "loose nukes" problem than the machinations of A.Q. Khan and his associates. However, the chapters are generally an excellent read. As a one-time consultant for Microsoft in greater China, I found the chapter on the cross-cutting economic implications of counterfeiting especially insightful.
Effective countermeasures to illicit trade are necessarily elusive.The author is critical of supply-side enforcement, and indeed it hasn't worked well for drugs and other mass-market commodities. He suggests that to "stand between millions of customers desperate to buy and millions of merchants desperate to sell and stop them" may be asking too much of governments. Demand-side remedies may work better, though for items with great destructive potential, demand-reduction equates to conflict resolution--a long-term and uncertain proposition at best. In such areas, interdiction and source control programs-- locking down Russian nuclear warheads and materials, for example--remain indispensable guarantees of international security and stability.
Criminals without borders December 2, 2008
Vincent Poirier (Tokyo, Japan)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What do fake Rolex watches sold in New York street fairs have in common with DVDs on sale in Hong Kong, with prostitution in Phnom Penh, and with breached fences between Mexico and Texas?
They are all manifestations of a new world phenomenon, illicit trade.
With globalization eliminating the restrictive controls imposed on international trade, goods and services flow more freely, but of course the intention is for legitimate business to take place. Unfortunately the mushrooming of legitimate business flows and activities have created a stream in which illegal business can travel undetected alongside legitimate trading. Because controls have for all practical purposes been abolished, illegal business deals can hide much more easily. This effect was unintended, largely unforeseen, and it is what links child prostitutes in Bangkok to illegal immigrant workers in the US.
Moisés Naím comprehensively describes the most important areas of the illicit global trade. The first two chapters explain the concept of illicit trade and smuggling, then following chapters examine individual illicit industries: the arms trade, the drug trade, the slave trade, intellectual property theft, the human organ trade, etc.
Naím concludes that because of the volumes and of the amounts of money involved, none of this trade would be possible without tacit government and corporate support, usually in the form of outright corruption or passive acceptance. He describes how money from illicit operations is laundered to appear legitimate. One surprising finding is how drugs, because they are compact, are used to move profits around: the million dollar haul from an illegal lumber trade is more easily carried around as a pound of pure heroin than as a large suitcase full of cash!
He also describes how government agencies are corrupted, and how the very structure of government service keeps them from cooperating effectively. And that's _within_ a country! Between agencies in different countries, it is even more difficult to build trusting relationships.
Naím isn't completely without hope. He shows journalists as being effective investigators, at great peril to their lives. He sees non-government organizations (NGOs) as being innovative, flexible, and driven in a way government agencies cannot hope to ever be. He closes with advice on what we can do as private individuals to stem what he calls the hijacking of the global economy.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
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